TED2009: Biologist Robert Full

Biologist Robert Full is on stage at TED2009. He "studies cockroach legs and gecko feet. His research is helping build the perfect 'distributed foot' for tomorrow's robots, based on evolution's ancient engineering."

He's back with an update, and his mustache is bigger and better than ever.

His is curious about gecko toes. How can they climb up walls so fast? Their feet have little hairs and they ends have tons of split hairs. They are so tiny that molecular forces create the stickiness.

Now they have synthesized this stuff. It's a "directional adhesive." He showing a video of a woman climbing the side of a building using synthetic gecko feet material.

Problem with robots is that they can't get unstuck with this stuff. But he's solved that. He built a robot that uses the "toe peeling" technique to climb up walls like a gecko. (Here's a video of the Stickybot).

Engineers discovered that if robots don't have a tail, they fall off the wall. The "active tail" functions as a 5th leg and creates stability. A gecko uses its tail to right itself when it falls so it can land on its feet. Video of gecko flying around in wind chamber. It uses tail to guide it around to a landing spot. They learned that geckos glide in nature, too. So they created an active tail for the gecko.

What’s with all the TED talk spamming posts appearing on boing boing? I don’t mean to be a troll, i simply don’t see the need to hear about every new talk appearing on a relatively old website.

Yes TED is a really interesting site… but i think a once off “Hey TED is interesting, check it out” would be better than the tirade of “OMG new TED talk, OMG another one, OH they put another video up, OH more TED videos”

About the multiple TED posts, I’m pretty sure someone working at BB is trying to send a secret message hidden in the TED headlines and possibly in the first paragraph – though I haven’t totally ruled out the possibility that the message is hidden in the body of the post. Let’s put our brains together and see if we can figure what they’re trying to tell us.

Full didn’t develop stickybot. It was developed at Stanford University, in Professor Mark Cutkosky’s lab. Robert Full is a collaborator with Cutkosky’s lab for various projects, but to put credit where credit is due, Cutkosky deserves the credit in this post.